48
Stenner saw the doors open at the end of the hall, and men come out in cover formation. There were many of them, and they didn’t expect the darkness. Eight men moved forward slowly and quietly. Seven stayed behind in the elevator weapon barrels scanning. Stenner heard: “Switch to IR,” and the men reached up to snap down their goggles. They each took another two steps, and then the corridor flooded with light, the men holding their hands up to shield their eyes. Stenner leaned to the right and fired a twenty round burst down the long hallway with a light left to right spread and return, the fore-grip of his weapon bucking in his hand with the auto fire. Two rapid explosions followed, and men screamed.
Seyfert was disgusted that he had to fire on former US Army, but he knew he had no choice. None of the eight boys in the corridor would likely survive Stenner’s hail of lead, much less the IEDs he had planted himself. He switched the lights back off just as return fire left pockmarks all over the corridor. He looked to see if the Army kid had followed orders, and indeed he was gone. The return fire ceased because of the yelling of a man to stop shooting. Cries and wails of pain mixed with the ringing in the SEAL’s ears. The smell of freshly fired weapons made his adrenaline rush even more, and he slid through the lab door and dashed two meters to the shaft.
He hadn’t been as stealthy as he needed though, because gunfire erupted as he moved. He almost made the ladder before he felt two tugs in his right leg, one in the back of his upper thigh, and one is his calf. A hammer blow to his lower back propelled him forward, and he fell into the shaft reaching for the ladder. He caught it with both hands, but felt something pop in his right elbow, and searing pain leapt up his forearm. His MP5SD3 went clattering to the roof of the elevator cab twelve feet below.
Another few rounds came pinging over his head, and Seyfert thought that the shots he’d taken didn’t hurt near as much as his elbow as he began an agonizing climb down.
49
Shrill laughter echoed through the server room, mostly drowned out by the noise of the many servers themselves.
Bob tried to catch his breath. “Seriously? You seriously thought it was
alpha waves
? Awesome! Now I’ve heard some shit before, but this! Classic!”
Between guffaws, Bob noticed no one else was laughing, and his mirth fled. “Oh. You really are serious.” He wiped his eyes and looked at Tim who no longer struggled at his bonds. “Tim, they…oh yeah.” He looked at Brenda. “Look, Doc, that’s just crazy, and I know crazy. How in hell do you hijack alpha waves? It’s totally insane.”
Anna harrumphed, “Yeah, because dead people walking is a paragon of sanity.”
“Touché. But the thing is, Rama never escaped this facility. It’s still in the servers here, locked away under a mile of code.” Bob shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t get out, I’m telling you. Didn’t.”
The scientists and Bob began to discuss and debate the virus. Androwski, Wilcox, Rick, and Dallas looked at the monitors, and Anna was checking into the general health of Bob as he spoke.
Several small explosions shook the ceiling ever so slightly. “What was that?” demanded Bob. Brenda and Linda also looked scared, Androwski smiled. “That was Seyfert buying us time.” He turned to Ravi. “What do you guys need?”
“We have zombies below. We have paramilitary forces and more zombies above. We need to work, but I do not understand how this is possible under the circumstances. It may take weeks to finish, perhaps months if we can ever get a prototype antivirus at all.”
“It’s possible,” Dallas answered, jacking a round into the chamber of his shotgun with one hand, “cuz we’re gonna kill em all. Ain’t that right, Navy?”
Androwski turned from the monitors, looked over his shoulder, and smiled a half smile, “Damn skippy, hillbilly.” The monitor showed the laboratory corridor above, with men dead or dying from Seyfert’s handy work. Blood covered one wall, as did black scorch marks that looked like pepper. Several of the men were holding their ears, and a medic was checking others. One soldier with a suppressed MP-5 was firing into the skulls of some of his downed squad mates. All of the black-clad men had a gold III embroidered on their left breast.
The soldier who had sanitized his comrades pulled his balaclava down and glared into the camera with hate. He gave a long middle finger to the lens and mouthed the word
Traitors
before raising his SMG toward the camera. A white flash and the feed was gone.
Androwski hit a button and the feed switched to the same scene as viewed from the far end of the corridor. The elevator doors opened and more men came out in defensive postures.
“Shit.”
Seyfert more fell than climbed through the hatch on the top of the elevator car. Stenner helped him as best he could, having retrieved the SEAL’s rifle first. “You okay?”
“Do I look okay to you?”
Stenner looked more closely. The SEAL was bleeding profusely from the leg, and limped, cradling his right arm to his chest.
“No. You’re a mess.” Stenner put the SEAL’s left arm over his shoulder to help him down the hallway. “Medic!”
“Both leg wounds are through and through,” Anna Hargis said and moved to Seyfert’s back. “If the Kevlar was an inch shorter, the bullet would be in your liver, I would be helpless and you’d be dead in fifteen. Lucky bastard.”
“Don’t feel lucky.”
“Let me see your arm.” She felt around the elbow and touched a few places. “Yup, dislocated. Put your arm out, palm up. Now make a fist.” She put her hand in the crook of his elbow and pushed his fist back toward his body slowly. An audible pop sounded and Seyfert hissed a quick intake of breath. “That’s all I can do, try to move it.”
He did as instructed and moved his arm around. To his amazement, the agony was replaced with a dull painful throb. He opened and closed his hand and flexed his bicep. “Holy shit, when did you turn into a doctor?”
“Along the way.
That
little trick I learned when I was a kid and dislocated my elbow.” She began bandaging up his leg with supplies from the LAV. “No arteries, or you’d be bleeding a lot more. You really are lucky.”
“I got shot three times and fell down a hole. How is that lucky?”
She looked at him with incredulity. “Because you got shot three times, fell down a hole, and we’re having this conversation. Don’t you think if…”
She was interrupted by the ringing of the phone on the desk.
Androwski picked it up immediately, but didn’t say anything. He put the phone on speaker, and a jovial voice flooded the already loud room, “Hello? May I speak to whoever is in charge please?
Androwski sighed. “That’d be me.”
“Who’s me?”
“Cut the bullshit, pal, who are you?”
“No need to be hostile, sir, my name is Brooks. Special Agent Brooks of the recently defunct Central Intelligence Agency, and…other, organizations. Now I speak for the Triumvirate, the new ruling body of—”
“Don’t you need three for a triumvirate?” Androwski looked at the jacket covering Bourne. “Because I’m looking at a dead colonel, but I’m guessing you know that already.”
“Ah yes. Colonel Bourne was a loose cannon who wanted to steal a cure to this plague and sell it to—”
“Back to bullshit, are we? The colonel was a damn fine soldier. I followed him halfway across the country, and he wasn’t out to steal shit. I’m guessing it’s you who’s the fucking thief.” A few seconds went by and the phone remained silent. “What? No snappy comeback or truckload of bullshit?”
“I didn’t get your name.”
“Lieutenant Trent Androwski, US Navy.”
“Well, Chief, here it is in a nutshell, I outrank you, and I have been given leave by the President of the United States to accomplish my mission by any means necessary. I’m ordering you to give up the scientists and any data that they have—”
The SEAL harrumphed, “President? You just told me you no longer work for the United States, dick-nose.”
Bob laughed out loud. “Dick nose. Classic.”
The man on the phone continued unperturbed, “The President is dead, but I’m still following orders, as I’m sure are you. Give up the scientists and my men and I will leave you alone. You have my word.”
“The word of a CIA spook. Fuck you spook, come get them.”
The phone gave an audible sigh. “Pity. I was hoping it didn’t have to come to this. We’ll be right down.”
50
“Perhaps this man will listen to reason,” Linda said. “If we went with him, we could still do the research, and you would all be alive.”
Seyfert shook his head. “The moment he has you, he’ll kill all of us. Probably one of you as well, as incentive.”
“We need to get down a level,” Androwski said, looking at the staggering forms in the monitor. “Bob says there’s weapons and food.”
Bob pointed at the screen, “Yeah, and a shit load of
them
. I realize you guys are tough and whatnot, but even if you go all Clint Eastwood on them, there are too many. And he,” he pointed at Seyfert, “isn’t one hundred percent anymore.”
Seyfert raised his middle finger and winced at the pain.
“I rest my case.”
It was Androwski’s turn to shake his head, “Upstairs are superior numbers, fire power, and training. I have three fighters and a bunch of civvies.” Anna narrowed her eyes and was about to say something when the SEAL raised his hand, palm out. “You three, have more than proven yourselves, I should have said six fighters.”
Seyfert stood up. “The chief is right, we need to get down there and see what we can see. If this is the type of facility I think it is, there will be gobs of goodies down there. Maybe even enough to hold this CIA guy at bay, or even kill him. Plus, I’m betting dollars to doughnuts that there’s an emergency escape out of that hidey hole. The powers that be would have realized it was a deathtrap without another egress point.”
“That’s true,” Rick agreed. “We’re fifteen miles from a nuke plant, which would certainly have been a target of a ballistic missile. The upper floors of this building would have been irradiated if not completely destroyed if a missile hit the plant.” He looked at the monitor. “They must have had another way out.”
The big man cut in with his southern drawl, “Yeah, but don’t that mean there’s another way in?”
51
The man called Brooks got up from his seated position at a desk. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand in annoyance. “Well, that didn’t work.”
A black-clad soldier passed him a bottle of water. “They killed my friends. I don’t give a shit what they want, I’m gonna kill them.”
“Yes, and they know that too. From what I hear, SEALs are pretty tough. You think you really could kill them?”
“Fucking cowards are dug in and hiding. They left IEDs for us like a God damn insurgent. I will eat those Navy traitor-dicks alive.”
“Traitors yes, cowards no. They came from San Francisco, Captain. San Fran-fucking-cisco. That’s three thousand miles through hostile, infected terrain, with absolutely everything trying either to shoot or eat them. They lost most of their crew getting here, and they got the nerds before I did, and I’m good at what I do. I wish I had ten like them. All I got out of what you just said is that you eat dick. Now shut up and get ready. I’m going back upstairs to get our last two guys. We’re going to need them.”
Brooks strode to the elevator and used his card to access it. The doors opened and he stepped through. He began humming
The Girl from Ipanema
again as the steel box ascended. In just a few seconds, he was back at the first floor. He was fiddling with his radio, thinking that he should have called the rear guard first when the doors opened with a
ding
. More than sixty blood red eyes stared at him through the open door. He frantically pressed the Door Close button, but the stainless panels didn’t even make it halfway before rotting hands stopped them, and the elevator flooded with the dead.
“I don’t like this,” a Triumvirate soldier said to his comrade. “He’s been gone too long and he won’t answer the radio.”
“Relax, Jack,” answered his friend, “here he comes now.” He pointed at the elevator floor indicator above the doors.
The doors once again made a
ding
, and Hell poured out and swarmed the two men. One gave a half scream as he was savaged, but the other was engulfed without so much as a sound. Three other men came into the hall to investigate, and were immediately taken down as well. Another stuck his head out of a doorway and noticed a small horde of dead munching on his buddies. He ducked his head back in the room and slammed the door, but not before he had seen Brooks at the back of the elevator waving to him.
The elevator made eight more trips, until the entire corridor and several of the labs were wall to wall with staggering, blood-covered forms. Several of them were clad in black camouflage with gold III’s embossed over the left breast.
“Now these are soldiers,” Brooks murmured aloud from the back of the hallway. Instantly a dozen or so heads turned in his direction, and some creatures began stumbling toward him. “
Although I should keep quiet apparently
,” he thought. “
Troops that will never need food, or feel fear or compassion for the enemy
.
The perfect army, and they are legion. What commander has ever had such a force at his disposal? Pity they stink…
He looked once again at his new squads as they milled around searching for prey, and made a snap decision. He raised his eyes and smiled to himself, shaking his head. Initially he wanted a vaccine so he could give it to his troops of live soldiers, and some civilians to keep the plague in check. Now he realized he didn’t need a vaccine. Not only that, but anyone who could even remotely envision a vaccine was potentially devastating to him. Yup. Dr. Brenda Poole needed to take a dirt nap as soon as possible.